barbara starr is live for us in washington with that new information. barbara, what do you have? >> well, fredricka, u.s. intelligence had been watching yemen for weeks, if not months, watching a growing series of threa threats, potential threats in yemen. that's not surprising. that's always been a tough neighborho neighborhood. but it was within the last two weeks that the u.s. intelligence community began to understand, come into possession if you will of an intercepted message among senior al qaeda operatives that indicated planning was under way, possibly the final stages of planning, we're told, for an attack either in yemen, middle east, or north africa. we've actually been asked by an obama administration official not to go into a lot of detail about all of this because it is so sensitive, so serious, it could put things at risk. intercepts are some of the most critical that the u.s. intelligence gathers. what are intercepts? it could be a cell phone conversation, website posting, chat room, a courier message. there's any number of ways that the u.s. would come to have kn